Consummate attention-seeker Kevin Warwick has admitted to snooping on the public in a previous life. Warwick made the creepy confession on Radio 4, recalling an earlier job as a GPO engineer:
"I remember taking ten different calls and plugging them all together; one call would continue, the other nine would listen in. Then I'd …

I have a question..

If I superglue ICs to my forehead and staple RFID chips to my dog can I call myself a professor too? If not, any idea which website he bought his degrees from? Anyway he's wrong. Unless computers can provide sexual favours and then decide to withold them, women will still control men as neatly as they do now.

Radio 4 rentagob

Professor is a title, as is Fellow of the IEE.

Warwick is a disgrace to his adopted profession, and anyone taking him seriously or helping him further his media-tarte ambitions (which I happily believed had ended, until recently) belongs in an institution.

Warwick himself is already in at least two insitutions: in one, he is for some reason afforded the title Professor, and in the other he is not only afforded the title Fellow of the Institution (of Electrical Engineers, or some such), he is also given full glossy coverage in it's month journal (called T3 or something like that, I forget, as even the cat refuses to read it these days).

Warwick was on BBC R4 Today not many weeks ago too.

Presumably he has a book or TV series or pension shortfall or something to publicise?

Re: Professor

"Warwick himself is already in at least two insitutions: in one, he is for some reason afforded the title Professor"

That's how academia works, with or without *formal* support for the idea of tenure. If you start sacking your professors as soon as they stray from your rather idea of sensible, you end up with mediocrity, which is generally considered a Bad Thing amongst elite institutions.

Finding Nobel laureates is an expensive business. Think of dear Kevin as a down-payment.

Conway's Game of Life

If I run Conway's Game of Life on a computer, does it mean the computer is alive? What if nobody is watching it?

If I pass Kevin Warwick through the 3horsepower fan blades used to cool each rack cabinet of a 1970s mainframe, does it mean that Warwick lives on in the computer, despite being separated into millions and billions ((c) Brian Cox) of pieces?

If no one ever hears Warwick again, how do we know if he is still insane or not?

I would

If, and only if, there was any point to it. And there was no point to it, he didn't push the boundaries of medical or cybernetic knowledge any further forward, it was all completely average ho-hum, seen-it-before, no-advance-here stuff that was known to be perfectly safe. All it achieved, and all he wanted to achieve, was a load of publicity from a press that didn't understand what he was doing.

None of us, we're not the fucking stupid!

@OhFFS, Seriously, WTF!?

@OhFFS, "...would have the balls to have electrodes implanted to your nervous system, without knowing whether it would even be reversible without great injury"

You've been listening way too much to Kevin Warwick's self-publicising bull shit. Much of his claim to fame hinges on his implants, being the first etc..

Ok lets test that. For a start, "As of April 2009, approximately 188,000 people worldwide who have received cochlear implants".

("The first attempted clinical cochlear implant was in 1957 by Djourno and Eyriès. The recipient was implanted with a single channel device").

Or perhaps you would like to talk to the people with a pacemaker?

("The first clinical implantation into a human of a fully implantable pacemaker was in 1958 at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, using a pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Åke Senning").

By the way, Kevin Warwick took his first degree at Aston University in 1976, some almost 2 decades after the above examples. Not such a pioneer now is he and that's just two example that utterly destroy his claim to fame.

@The Jase

Here you go from wikipedia, with citation:

The second stage involved a more complex neural interface which was designed and built especially for the experiment by Dr. Mark Gasson and his team at the University of Reading. This device consisted of an internal electrode array, connected to an external "gauntlet" that housed supporting electronics. It was implanted on 14 March 2002, and interfaced directly into Warwick's nervous system. The electrode array inserted contained 100 electrodes, of which 25 could be accessed at any one time, whereas the median nerve which it monitored carries many times that number of signals. The experiment proved successful, and the signal produced was detailed enough that a robot arm developed by Warwick's colleague, Dr Peter Kyberd, was able to mimic the actions of Warwick's own arm.[26]

He then got his nervous system wired up to his wife's (and, I think, a robot arm controller). That is really, really cool and fuck anyone who disagrees. Nervous system control over a robot arm and inter-nervous system communications are awesome.

lived

Geri was in the spice girls

Well fuck me then.

Because I disagree. He didn't connect up "his nervous system", just one tiny bunch of fibers from one sensory-muscular nerve in the arm. So, he could twitch his muscles and have it picked up, and if a current was injected feel a little twinge. This is not particularly advanced in the field of implant technology, as already pointed out elsethread. Biofeedback-controlled artificial limbs have been around for a while now and he's not innovating there either. And, when it comes to it, connecting up his wife to a similar rig (and by the way, that either gives the lie to his bravado claims of how dangerous it was to get implanted, or it exposes him as a callous stonehearted fuck who would risk his wife's mobility to chase his obsessive dream - your choice) is equally far from genuinely interconnecting two nervous systems. So he can twitch his arm muscle and she can feel a twinge in her arm? You could do the same thing entirely externally with an electromyogram on him and a TENS stimulator on her. Or, he could just pull on a string and a boxing-glove on a spring could jump out and punch her in the face; it really isn't fundamentally different.

@AC 16:13 Geri

"He then got his nervous system wired up to his wife's (and, I think, a robot arm controller). That is really, really cool and fuck anyone who disagrees. Nervous system control over a robot arm and inter-nervous system communications are awesome"

The most surprising bit about that is the fact that some woman was mental enough to become his wife - what WAS she thinking?

then...

Re: then...

Ahh Captain Cyborg has surfaced again. :)

The guy is a clown. Its entertaining to listen to his laughable scaremongering and over inflated ego of what he has done, but that Wikipedia passage should be reinstated. Kevin Warwick makes some ludicrous attention seeking claims about his field of work and nothing he has done is original (it all has prior art, so to speak), yet his mainstream media persona promotes him as some kind of global research pioneer.

His mainstream media persona needs some balance, like reinstating that Wikipedia passage.

Well...

He was my personal tutor and took me for the subject which covered motors and generators. I have always found him to be a very nice person, who helped my through some pretty tough times (depression) while I was at uni.

He was always very open about the fact that one of his main tasks was to publicise the department which, as everyone here is banging on about him, seems to be working. Don't let the publicity detract from the fact that he has done some very serious work in the field and raising awareness of the field of Cybernetics, which is still pretty much unheard of, less understood. I'd lay a tenner on the fact that the vast majority of people commenting here don't know what Cybernetics is - at least they don't know until they've gone to wikipedia to look it up...

This week I shall mostly be called Professor

That was on Tuesday,

I don't know who this asshole is but . . .

This reminds me of the time I was working at a newspaper office as the after hours switchboard operator.

We had 28 lines to the outside, I was 16 years old, the temptation was too much to resist.

I threw all 28 lines off hook and dialed 'O". I had as many as 28 operators all talking to each other and trying to figure out what was going on. I left them off hook until the operators started hanging up once I could see straight from laughing so hard.

I only did it that one time, because I knew that I was at the only business in town with so many phone lines and they would figure it out if I kept doing it.

Irony much?

@Irony much?

Book, due September.

"Presumably he has a book or TV series or pension shortfall or something to publicise?"

Book, due September, apparently.

Is all publicity good publicity, or is it better to use the next few months to widely publicise that he's still [1] a scientifically clueless Z-list media celebrity wannabe and hope the book ends up in the remainder shops sooner rather than later?

And...

Kevin is my cleaning lady.

Futility = voltage over current

Mark my words; one day soon Mr. Warwick will be so hungry for publicity he'll stick a mobile phone up his arse and claim to be a real-life Borg drone, connected to the hive mind of the internet *directly*.

New to me

I must have missed out on this guy. I went back and read the stuff from 9-10 years ago. He's really funny. Sadly it seems that the Kevin Warwick Watch blog was discontinued. The URL now leads to an insurance broker (presumably of the same name).